Be Not Afraid of Love: Lessons on Fear, Intimacy and Connection

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i just had a deeper understanding of what their situation was and how it impacted their life as well as how it changed their views on things. Zhu has found a way to lift the veil on the feelings and phenomena we experience but haven’t figured out a way to articulate to ourselves—let alone to the world—and uses their writing as both a mirror and a doorway: reflecting these parts back to us and inviting us in to process them together.

It’s definitely been a roller coaster of emotions, especially experiencing some imposter syndrome at the beginning. Read too much like a college thesis (with the Instagram and Youtube footnotes too) or a primer for people new to community activism and self reflection.

I've definitely navigated a lot of painful family stuff that I'm actively healing with them, with my biological family. Zhu conveys their story with such honesty and clarity that it forges connections to your heart straight through the page. What follows is a soul-baring look at Zhu’s journey toward healing as a survivor of intimate partner abuse. It’s a mixture of emotions — it's been beautiful and scary, but kind of like my messaging in the book, I’m learning to sit with the fear and just allow what happens to happen and what’s to come to arrive. But if there’s one thing they’ve learned throughout this process, it is to embrace love and connection, as the book’s title suggests.

Mimi Zhu’s Be Not Afraid of Love is the kind of book that is effused with such candor and care that the words themselves become a salve. I’ve realized that the posts that people resonate with the most are the most honest — the ones where I’m talking about my insecurities or my jealousies or my intrusive thoughts. Somente após este período é que será cobrado automaticamente o valor da mensalidade, utilizando o método de pagamento cadastrado. I have witnessed violence seep into intimate relationships and I have seen how love has been misconstrued as the means to abuse, control, and possess.

Your posts seem to stand out more because of the platform they’re on — a really deep thought about insecurity will be sandwiched between posts of people being a little more fake. I did think the chapters on numbness and shame were very, very excellent - this book will probably be life changing for some folks! Zhu’s candid storytelling, both/ands and all, underscores an uncomfortable but deeply human truth: Healing from abuse is a complicated, nonlinear process . It asks us to become 'familiar with our shadows' and to honour emotions that often feel too unpalatable to share - rage, numbness, dissociation, profound grief - and to understand both the necessity and inevitability of these feelings when engaging with love in all its forms.

Mimi's powerful and provocative words will guide and inspire readers to lean into love with softness. I liked their honesty about the pain of their abusive relationship and the wide range of emotions they experienced after it. Or we are encouraged to milk our grief and capitalize on our experiences, generating trauma porn for the masses to consume.Twenty scattered pieces of paper surrounded me in a circle, and I read each of them out loud, burning them one by one. Heartrending and revolutionary, Be Not Afraid of Love is a testament to the strength and adaptability all humans possess, and a tribute to love in all its forms.